There is an expression about “boiling the frog.” It sounds awful, but the expression refers to the fact that a frog placed in tepid water brought to a boil slowly will not recognize the rising temperature and its impending death. It is used as a metaphor in business to describe leadership’s slow recognition and unwillingness to react to threats. Is the hybrid workforce structure the “frog” causing the organizational culture to erode to one that is undesirable, because leaders have failed to adapt? An effective workplace culture supports employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, employee voice, and employee recognition, and all are based on core values of trust, empathy, and respect. Without exemplary leadership able to keep employees connected to the culture, the organizational culture is at risk. In many cases, organizational leaders have not responded in a way that supports the culture they worked to develop before hybrid work became common during the pandemic. Instead of embracing hybrid as a permanent workforce model, they continue to treat it as a temporary disruption. They fail to see hybrid work as an opportunity to build a culture that better fits the changing needs of the workforce.
TEPID WATERS OF LEADERSHIP
Companies that insisted their employees come back to the office full-time after the pandemic ended were surprised by the resistance they encountered. Some exceptions exist, but the hybrid work model is here to stay. Employees found their voice after adapting their lifestyles to fit the hybrid model, and now they do not want to disrupt their lives again. The challenge managers have to address is that they did not initially pay much attention to supporting the organizational culture, because the hybrid work schedule was not originally intended to be permanent. Now that it is permanent, and companies want to retain workers, leaving leaders to wonder if they already allowed the frog to boil. Did they let the hybrid employees disengage from the onsite workforce, fail to ensure employees working at home retained their voice in the organization, overlook qualified hybrid employees for development and promotion, and let employee-leadership interactions become random rather than routine? Did leaders give hybrid employees the impression that they believed they were taking advantage of the employer, and not working efficiently by allowing personal responsibilities to interfere? Did the CEO try to force employees to return to the office five days a week, creating conflict and giving the impression that employee well-being was unimportant?
These leadership actions are the “tepid water” that boils slowly, killing the organizational culture and leaving many leaders wondering what happened. Alex Cambon, the research director at Gartner’s HR practice and principal author of a 2022 global study, found that only 25% of hybrid or remote knowledge workers felt connected to the organization’s culture. But forcing employees to return to the office has proven difficult and almost impossible in many cases, so some companies have relented. He said, “I find it ironic when leaders say they must bring workers back to the office because of culture. They’re going to get the opposite of what they hope for.” He says culture is evaluated based on employee alignment with the culture and connectedness, meaning employees identify with the culture.
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